Scarcity

We are seeing more examples of out of stocks of new release games in recent years. Point Salad and Wingspan especially come to mind. Demand for them is so heavy at release that quantities are seriously allocated and then by the time restocks come in, interest has waned and players move onto the next hot thing. Gloomhaven is a perfect example of this. At release, copies were selling for in excess of $200. Now that interest has waned, you can find copies readily on the secondary market for $75 to $100.

The point is, if you want a game that you think is going to be hot, the thing to do is to put a pre-order in with us ahead of time. If we get pre-orders, like with comics, we know to adjust our orders upwards in order to get a sufficient quantity in to handle demand. Otherwise, like with Wingspan, we will be out of stock for months.

Helvault

Longtime Magic players may remember the Helvault promotion, tied in with the Avacyn Restored pre-release. Stores regegistering to host pre-releases received Helvaults to open during the pre-release as players completed certain activities, such as playing a type of card or winning a match. It was a pretty cool idea as players really wanted to see what was inside. Unfortunately, some retailers decided to show them what was inside early and posted videos to YouTube showing the contents. Ruined the anticipation of the event for everyone else, which is likely one reason Wizards has not run a similar promotion in the years since.

New Demo Games

We just added 4 new games to the demo game library:
Fury of Dracula
Blank
Clip Cut Parks
We Need to Talk

We need to talk is a good social party game, while Clip Cut Parks and Blank are both good family games. Fury of Dracula is more intense and requires a longer time commitment,  2-4 hours, than the other two do.

Pokemon Hidden FatesElite Trainers

We got in one case of the Hidden Fates Elite Trainer boxes which have proved very hard to find and are selling for $75 to $100 on ebay.  We expect these to sell very quickly at $59.99 when they go on sale on Sept 20th. Coupled with the shortages of the Hidden Fates set are the desirability of some of the cards in the set, with some cards in the set going for well over $400 .

Trade and Buying Times

If you want to trade in or sell us larger quantities of items i.e. a box of comics or cards or several RPGs or boardgames or miniatures, please  bring them in after 3 p.m. on Tuesday or before 8:30 p.m. the rest of the week (5:30 p.m. on Sunday). On Tuesday, we process the week's comic receiving from 10 a.m. until about 3 p.m. and after 8:30 (and 5:30) we start procedures for closing for the night, so in both cases we may not give your items the attention they deserve, especially if you have a lot of cards or comics for us to examine. We will gladly make an offer on single items at any time.

GameStop Closures

GameStop announced that its sales are down about 15% for the second quarter of 2019 and the company closed 195 stores in the past year and plans to close another 200-300 in the next year. That is a pretty tiny amount, given that the GameStop chain has around 5800 stores but given the continual decline in sales, the company needs to do something to return to profitability. The only section of the company that has proved profitable is its greater movement into collectibles.

Lots of Games Coming

I did a quick count of the number of games and expansions offered in the newest issues of Game Trade Magazine and Meeple Monthly not counting novels and non-fiction books or miniatures figures, and came out with over 120 different items. Of course, publishers want to produce new products for their customer base and there are some customers, not many, unfortunately, who will buy everything that releases new for a game.  If we count in miniatures and books, we are looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of  over 150 new items each month. That works out to about 1800 to 2000 new gaming products every year. That is a lot of products for the market to absorb. Online stores have infinite shelf and display space to display products but for the brick and mortar store, carrying that many new products on top of perennial selling products like D&D, Catan, Betray at House on the Hill, Fluxx, Dead of Winter, Munchkin, Gloom,  etc. (though some companies are considerately making the FLGS job easier by offering exclusives to chain stores such as Target, Barnes and Noble and Walgreens, meaning we don’t have to worry about stocking them, but that is a subject for another post).